Eleanor Of Aquitaine
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Authors: Amy Kelly
BY AMY KELLY
PUBLISHED BY HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
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COPYRIGHT © 1950 BY THE
PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF
COPYRIGHT RENEWED © 1978 BY
J. MARGARET MALCOLM
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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THIS ACCOUNT OF QUEEN ELEANOR and her century is offered as a study of individuals who set their stamp upon the events of their time, rather than as a study of developing systems of politics, economics, or jurisprudence. While it is hoped that it is conformable to what is known of institutions, it explores a different area, using many materials that the historian of institutions must perforce, for reasons of brevity and clarity, leave aside, yet which are a part of the tradition that is history in a wide sense.
The materials used are in general,"contemporary," sources (those of the twelfth century, expanded by a decade or two at either end), and they include chronicles, biographies, literature — secular and ecclesiastic — epistles, and commentaries, in which the reader may see brought together in one account what the century says about itself. Occasionally incidents about the century recorded in later eras, but not found in the documents of the time, are included as tradition. I am, of course, greatly indebted to secondary sources, particularly for guidance to primary materials. Students who have worked with primary sources know that these records vary greatly in trustworthiness; it is beyond the scope of this book, however, to offer even a summary of the considerable critical work that has been done about twelfth-century writings. Suffice it to say that in that early period large borrowings without acknowledgment were common; some chroniclers were tempted, through the influence of patronage, self-interest, egotism, rancor, to select or distort facts; others were able, through favorable location or employment, to have firsthand knowledge of what they report, and scholarly evaluation has judged these latter writers generally reliable.
In the use of primary materials considerable effort has been made to discriminate between probable hearsay and probable fact, between gossip and authentic report, and frequent reference is made to sources so that the curious reader may set forth at any point upon critical excursions of his own. As much inference is required in a study of this kind as in a study of selected aspects of the time, but where inference is required to bridge gaps in the sources or to explain situations, it is indicated, with the sources on which it is based.
The twelfth century affords especially rich materials for such study. Persons representing important aspects of experience flourished in numbers - Capets and Plantagenets, Becket, Saint Bernard, Abélard, troubadour poets, Guillaume le Maréchal, Héloise — to cite a varied few. The time is marked by many stirrings — the intellectual revolt, the turn from Romanesque to Gothic, the impulse to crusade, the struggle between church and state, the rise of vernacular literature, and others. The urban culture of the great cities is distinctive.
Queen Eleanor knew all the personages; she was concerned with all the movements, to many of which she contributed notably; and she knew every city from London and Paris to Byzantium, Jerusalem, Rome, besides all those of her own provinces in western Europe. Her story, which runs through the last three quarters of the century, provides a,"plot," almost as compact as that of a novel, for she was the center of the feud between the Capets and the Plantagenets that agitated the whole period and culminated in the collapse of the Angevin empire. Without historical distortion or any attempt to fictionize, her history brings the diverse elements together and into relation.
This work has been finished only with valuable assistance. First, I should like to thank certain scholars who on many matters have given me generously the benefit of their special knowledge: Professor Roger Sherman Loomis, Laura Hibbard Loomis, Professor Urban Tigner Holmes, Elizabeth McCracken, Professor Andrée Bruel, and the late Professor W. L. Bullock of the
For research assistance I am indebted to reference librarians and archivists in many places, and to the libraries they represent for special privileges: the Library of Congress; the Peabody Library in Baltimore; the New York Public Library; the libraries of Princeton University and the General Theological Seminary, New York; the Boston Public Library; and especially the libraries of Harvard University — the collections of Houghton, Widener, and the Fogg Museum — and of Wellesley College. To Miss Margaret Boyce of the Wellesley College Library, my debt is beyond acknowledgment. Abroad I have enjoyed special courtesies at the Rylands Library, the Manchester Central Library, and the
Tours
,
Poitiers
,
Bordeaux
, in the library of the
Jerusalem
.
I owe special gratitude to Mrs. W. S. Tower for her gift to the Wellesley Library of the twenty-four folio volumes of the
Recueil des historiens da Gaules et de la France
, which made it possible to work at home in fragments of leisure over several years; and to many others who have made rare books accessible to me; to friends who have traveled with me over most of the queen's itineraries in England and on the Continent and on her journeyings during the Second Crusade; to Helene B. Bullock, Vera Nabokov, Professor Elizabeth Hodder, Antoinette P. Metcalf, and Elizabeth Kelly, who, with others previously mentioned, have read the manuscripts from various points of view; to Professor Helen Sard Hughes and Margaret Malcolm for practical assistance that has been a gift of time and energy.
Here I should like to acknowledge gratefully the permission of the Medieval Academy of America to use the substance of an article published in
Speculum
, January, 1937, entitled,"Eleanor of Aquitaine and her Courts of Love,"; and to Houghton Mifflin Company for permission to quote (pages 307-308 above) some lines from Henry Adams' translation of Coeur-de-Lion's
sirventés
. Unless otherwise indicated, translations in the text are mine. The end-paper map was drawn by Dr. Erwin Raisz of the
AMY KELLY
1 The Rich Dower
2 O
Paris
!
3 Via Crucis
4 Fear the Greeks
5
Antioch
the Glorious
6
Jerusalem
7 The Queen and the Duke
8 The Countess and the Poet
9 The Second Crown
10 Forging the Empire
11 King and Archbishop
12 Becket in Exile
13 Montmirail and
Canterbury
14 The Flower of the World
15 The Court of Poitiers
16 Henry and His Sons
17 Sedition
18 Poor Prisoner
19 The Christmas Court
20 War Was in His Heart
21 Henry Revokes His Lands
22 The Fallen Elm of Gisors
23 The Lion Heart Is King
24 The Sicilian Interlude
25 Things Done Overseas
26 Shipwreck and Disguise
27 Eleanor Queen of
England
28 The Ransom
29 Captive and Betrayer
30 The Treasure of Chalus
31 Lackland's Portion
32 Blanche and Isabella
33 Mirebeau
34 The Hope of
35 The Queen Goes Home
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
LOUIS THE SIXTH OF FRANCE, Louis the Fat, lay sick in his hunting lodge at Bethizy, whither his bearers had brought him from the unprecedented heat and the fetid odors of the summer in Paris. He was not old — verging on sixty — but he was failing perceptibly. The chalky pallor, the bleared vision, the occasional palsy that had long marked him, were attributed to an abortive attempt of his stepmother, Queen Bertrade, to dispose of him by poison in his early years. Latterly he had grown so ponderous that he could no longer mount a horse or stoop to lace a shoe. About him in the sultry room were gathered some of his prelates and barons palatine, chief among them his lifelong friend and counselor, Abbé Suger. A confessor stood by prepared to administer the sacrament
in extremis
.
It was an ill chosen time to assail the king with matters of the utmost urgency. Yet in the antechamber certain knights who had posted over the burning leagues of western Europe from
Bordeaux
were impatiently awaiting royal deliberations on business they had brought from the greatest fief dependent upon the crown. Briefly this was their affair.
Louis's most difficult feudatory, Guillaume, Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine, had, by a culmination of disasters, come to an untimely end in the course of an Easter pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James of Compostella, and had already for some weeks lain buried at the foot of the saint's altar in far-off Galicia.
2
The fact of his death had been discreetly concealed. It was not yet widely known even in his own provinces Guillaume, who was distinguished by a special intransigence, had in his last hours been at swords' points with certain of his own vassals. It was even said that he had gone as a pilgrim to
Spain
for no other reason than to bespeak the puissant aid of Saint James against his enemies at home, and that his sudden death had providentially saved the
3
Guillaume was only thirty eight and might have been expected to worry along in his very perfunctory allegiance to the King of France for many years to come, while Louis busied himself with other pressing matters But his early death in 1137 brought the king face to face with problems that could not be postponed.
Guillaume's only heirs were two daughters Eleanor, the elder, was a girl
(jeune pucelle)
scarcely fifteen This young duchess, with her legacy of violent and unfinished quarrels, was King Louis's vassal, his lawful marriage prize to bestow as best suited his interests. But she was, in the circumstances, a prize to be quickly gathered in, for by reason of the anarchy that reigned in her provinces, she was more than likely to be rapt away by some rebel baron of her own vassalage, who might thus make himself a formidable rival of the king.
It was of the inestimable treasure of
Poitou
and
France
discoursed in Béthizy. The great Capetian was a sober and practical king. His physical handicaps might seem to reveal a weakling; yet steadily for long years he had advanced the interests of his people, pressed outward the boundaries of his domain, curbed a presumptuous vassalage, and made his court a bulwark of Christendom, a bar of feudal justice, a seat of philosophy. For the twenty-nine years of his reign his central policy had been to build up from adjoining fiefs a solid royal domain. He was at the moment watching with apprehensive eye the growing Angevin pretensions in Normandy, which lay athwart both his own lands and those of the late Count Guillaume. What could be more propitious than the peaceful acquisition of
Poitou
and
Who could gainsay the plain duty of the king in the crisis to attach the Duchy of Aquitaine, the
Louis Capet, the Young, had not originally been designated for the brilliant fortune that now awaited him. As second son of Louis the Fat, he had been bred in the cloister of Notre Dame for one of those ecclesiastical preferments reserved for younger brothers.
5
His senior, Philip, had been anointed as the future King of France. But these arrangements had been inscrutably changed in the twinkling of an eye, and by a very humble agency. Philip, riding in
Paris
with an escort on an autumn day in the neighborhood of the Greve, had aroused from the ooze of the
Seine
a vagrant sow, which, floundering between the legs of his horse, had caused it to stumble and fall. The precious prince had been carried, broken and senseless, to a burger's house along the quay, and had there died without recovering consciousness for confession or viaticum. Thereupon Louis, a boy of ten, was brought blinking from the cloister and anointed by the Pope himself as successor of the Capets in the royal cathedral of
Reims
. The youth had been thus suddenly in a single night translated from the highest spiritual to the highest temporal prospects.
The prince who had thus been retrieved from the cloister, although the rigors of monastic disciplines had already laid hold of him, appears to have been wholly docile toward the plan to provide him with a dowry and a wife. An accident had designated him as king, and another chance as strange now six years later more than doubled his realm and offered him a duchess in whom, from all he could learn, he would be fortunate in every way. The conviction that he had been summoned by heaven from the renunciations of the cloister to some august service in the world bore in upon him. Everything gave him to think himself a dedicated instrument. By some strange moving of destiny he had been called to be a king; but he would never forget that he had first made his vows to champion the church and renounce the world.
*
In view of the disorders in Aquitaine and the crisis certain to ensue if Count Guillaume's death became known among his enemies, Louis the Fat perceived that haste was of the essence of his enterprise. Such an escort as should put the fear of the Capets into the brigandly vassals of Poitou and Aquitaine was speedily made ready for the prince. Five hundred of the
preux chevaliers
of the French domain were summoned, the most imposing, the richest, the best. None was spared by reason of age or dignity from going down to Bordeaux in the insufferable heat to fetch the duchess to Paris — not the great Thibault of Champagne himself, nor Abbé Suger, nor the king's cousin, Raoul de Vermandois, nor the Count of Nevers, nor any other knight of importance.
While the escort was assembling, the sick king took the prince in hand, preparing him as best he might for the role thrust prematurely upon him. In looks Louis the Young was comely and well set, tall, with a slender boy's figure and courteous mien. Blond locks fell upon his shoulders, and he looked out upon the world with mild azure eyes. The youth was every way a credit to Abbé Suger, who had directed his education, for he felt the compulsion of nobility to be virtuous.
8
He had some of the humility of the oblate still clinging about him, which his more recent knightly disciplines had failed to eradicate. However, he was well endowed and personable as befitted his fortunes. The king counseled his son to comport himself on the journey at all times with dignity and justice, to pay his way liberally, to offer no offense by billeting his troops, as he might have claimed a feudal right to do, in the territories of the duchess. He warned him against putting his precious life in jeopardy by any show of violence against the turbulent vassals of Poitou and Aquitaine. He provided rich coffers in the hands of Thibault of Champagne and Abbé Suger, who were designated as the prince's special mentors. And at last he gave his son, with his blessing, a royal gift of jewels for the Duchess Eleanor.
Setting out from Paris in mid-June, the prince and his escort took a route midway between Toulouse and Angoulême, avoiding the scenes of Count Guillaume's recent encounters with his enemies. It was said that the heat obliged the cortege to travel by night, and this is perhaps why they arrived in Limoges, apparently without heralding, in time for the feast of Saint Martial, the patron of that province. They had made the expedition from Paris in less than a month. It seems to have been from Limoges, still more than a week's journey from Bordeaux, that the rumor of Count Guillaume's death and the advent of the French king's cavalcade spread far and wide. But if there had been barons bold enough at the moment of Guillaume's death to seize the duchess, none dared to stir with the Capetian's men-at-arms on the road southward from Limoges.
In the burning heat the French cavaliers pressed on, though suffering horse and man. Their supplies melted, says the chronicler, like wax. They passed through Péngueux and arrived at length on the east bank of the Garonne, opposite the ducal city. Before the middle of July they debouched from the low wooded hills of Larmont and pitched their colored pavilions on the level stretches by the river. From his royal tent, sown with the lilies of France, the prince could look westward when the sun went low upon the moon shaped bend of the Garonne where Bordeaux sat enthroned, moated among rivers and girdled with towers. Above the crenelated walls loomed the domes of Saint Andre and the square towers and bastions of the palace of the Ombriere, from someone of which he could not doubt the duchess looked out upon the stir of his encampment. The next day the prince and his escort crossed the river.
*
The Poitevins are full of life, able as soldiers, brave, nimble in the chase, elegant in dress, handsome, sprightly of mind, liberal, hospitable.
Twelfth-century Pilgrim's Guide
The Duchess Eleanor was a prize to draw the covetous attention of ambitious nobles, for the patrimony she inherited from her forebears was one of the goodliest of the feudal world.
10
It spread from the river Loire to the foothills of the Pyrenees, from the central heights of Auvergne to the western ocean. It was wider and fairer than that of her overlord, the King of France himself; ampler and more gracious than the counties which the Dukes of Normandy held north of the Loire; richer and more genial than the island of Britain, where Stephen of Blois wore the crown of the Norman conquerors. The fief of the duchess was rich and desirable in itself; but its special importance was that its addition, through the marriage of its heiress to any other domain in western Europe, would raise that domain to preeminence over all the others.
The contours of the land itself gave scope for the florescence of a feudal aristocracy It is sharply accented especially in the south, marked by ridges and buttes, towering, sudden, sheer, where the seigneurs of the regime withdrew themselves and there, islanded aloft in pride and security, overlooked the river courses, the crossroads, and the tangle of lesser thoroughfares cutting the woodlands and the arable plains they held in fee. Aquitaine is said to have its name from the abundance of its waters. On a map the Garonne looks like a great fern graven in the earth, the stalk its course, the leaflets its numerous tributaries, all offering easy routes of intercourse. Farther north the Loire is stem to a more straggling system watering a wide, inviting land. The river networks, the striking tors, interspersed with fertile plains, both suggest and emphasize the character of feudal society. In the day of the Duchess Eleanor this society was, as a way of life, passing its brilliant prime.
Some fragrance of the ancient Roman culture that had been extinguished or absorbed in other European centers still lingered in Bordeaux. In its schools and the riverain villas of the deep south, where its scholars and philosophers took their leisure, there still bloomed some late roses of that summer. The ducal court itself was a center of diffusion for an art and a civility that spread among the great fiefs of the river valleys and along the busy thoroughfare from Tours to the Pyrenees. For the Counts of Poitou were not merely soldiers and administrators. The duchess's forebear, Guillaume V, the Grand, in the midst of heavy campaigns, gave his nights to reading. Alone throughout long evenings, he conned the treasury of books he had acquired by exchange with other potentates, or by loan from the great monastic libraries of Limoges and Cluny.
11
Eleanor's grandfather, Guillaume IX, composed and gave vogue to the new vernacular poetry of the troubadours, and his verse itself gives evidence of his roving mind and foot and the widest liberality of view. Through it shine glints of Ovidian sophistry and the rich romantic colors of Moorish Spain. It is a poetry highly organized in form, intellectually subtle, lusty, piquant, cynical, the pastime of a worldling, who lived each day with gusto, dined well, slept heartily, and recked little of the awful day of judgment. These and other forebears as illustrious were heroes of those rhymed tales, the
chansons de geste
, recited not only in the high places of Poitou and the Limousin, but in all the courts of Europe. The family had founded Cluny, that,"pleasance of the angels,"
12
and they had seated popes in Rome; but more often the dukes were found supporting antipopes, scourging their local bishops, and abetting the schisms that sprang up abundantly on the soil of Aquitaine. Altogether the mind of the young duchess had been freely exposed to a great variety of ideas and made hospitable to novelty.
